Pretty soon, a very large, grand-looking man, with a sea cloak about him, came on deck. “And who is he?” I said to the captain. “Why, that’s your _greatest_ American,” he replied. “That’s the man who cared for the Germans in the siege of Paris. That’s Minister Washburne, the friend of Germany.” Sure enough, on a day’s notice, Mr. Washburne had come aboard when we touched at Southampton. He had been sick in his cabin till this moment. He guessed the storm had shaken the bile out of him, he said, when I introduced myself to him. He had been too sick to know the danger we had been in. Now he stayed on deck and was well. Mr. Washburne was General Grant’s first and truest friend. Without his tireless support, from Galena to Appomattox, the name of General Grant had not gone farther than his father’s tannery. Genius must have somebody to open the door for it. Washburne did it for Grant. John Sherman, in the House and Senate, did it for his illustrious brother. Barras did it for Napoleon. Even a cannon ball, rolling down hill, has to be started by somebody. * * * * * It is the last day of the voyage. The captain gave a banquet last night to Mr. Washburne. All Germans are deep in their gratitude to him for his work in Paris. Many speeches were made at the table, many toasts drunk. When Mr. Washburne rose to speak, he looked like the picture of Daniel Webster. The same large head, the same intellectual countenance. He looked like a statesman, not a politician. He was of the kindest manners, and loved to talk of the people he had known. I had the pleasure of walking for hours daily with him, up and down the deck, sometimes far into the night. He had been Lincoln’s friend, as well as Grant’s, and there was no end to the incidents he could tell of the great President. I regret now that I did not write them down. He also talked of the Commune in Paris, whose horrors he had witnessed. He believed socialism and mobism a disease. In Paris it was infectious. He told me much of his youth out West. He went to Galena a poor boy, and when he studied law in an office, making fires as pay for use of books, he had nothing but a buffalo robe to sleep on, spread on the office floor. Later, he was a Cabinet Minister. He was a true Republican, through and through. Hobnobbing with the nobility of France had made no snob of him. He asked me to make him acquainted with Terry. “I like and honor such men,” he said; “they are the salt of the earth, these self-made Americans. They are what makes a republic possible.”